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CALVIN COOLIDGE 




A MAN WITH VISION— 
BUT NOT A VISIONARY 



From 
Coolidge's Public Speeches 

THE people cannot look to legisla- 
tion generally for success. Indus- 
try, thrift, character, are not conferred 
by act or resolve. 

EACH man is entitled to his rights 
and the rewards of his service, be 
they never so large or never so small. 

THE measure of success is not 
merchandise, but character. 

THE man who builds a factory, 
builds a temple; the man who works 
there, worships there; and to each is 
due, not scorn and blame, but rever- 
ence and praise. 

EXPECT to be called a standpatter, 
but don't be a standpatter. Expect to 
be called a demagogue, but don't be a 
demagogue. Don't hesitate to be as 
revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate 
to be as reactionary as the multiplica- 
tion table. 

WE NEED more of the Office Desk 
and less of the Show Window in 
politics. 

THERE is no right to strike against 
the public safety by anybody, anywhere, 
any time. 






f^X From Woman's Home Companion, March, 1920. 

f The Silent Man on 
Beacon Hill 

i An Appreciation of Calvin 
f Coolidge 

By BRUCE BARTON 

WE LIKE novelties, we Americans; espec- 
ially do we like them in our public life — and 
nowhere else are we offered so pathetically few 
of them. Year after year the same familiar types 
crop up in politics to go through the same thread- 
bare campaign gymnastics. The same stuffed- 
shirt oratory; the same "pointing with pride" and 
"viewing with alarm;" the same old exaggeration 
and distortion — no wonder political meetings are 
unattended and political news gets tucked back 
into the center of the paper. We have heard it all 
before; we know it is merely part of a game 
played by rule, with all too little of sincerity or 
conviction; we suffer it in silence, and sigh with 
relief when it is through. Only at rare intervals 
does something fresh and new and different break 
across the dull horizon; and when that unexpected 
does occur we draw a deep breath, and thank God 
and take courage. 

Roosevelt was such a blessed phenomenon; 
Wilson, when he emerged from the sheltered con- 
fines of the university to run for governor afford- 
ed us a new sensation — a college professor run- 
ning for governor; it was worth watching, worth 
reading about. And now, to stir our jaded in- 
terest, another new thing under the sun has ap- 
peared — a politician who apparently conforms to 



none of the established rules; who operates alter 
his own peculiar fashion, and yet somehow suc- 
ceeds in getting his fellow citizens to vote for 
him in numbers that have made all political ob- 
servers stop, look, and listen. 

Whether Calvin Coolidge has any chance for 
the Presidency I do not know; this story is not 
written about Coolidge the Presidential possi- 
bility. It is written about Coolidge the human 
being, the silent, half mysterious individual who 
sits there on Beacon Hill, running the State of 
Massachusetts and causing even old-time political 
reporters who visit him to feel a little thrill of 
wonder and of questioning, 

I have said that he is something new under the 
sun; in another sense everything about him is 
reminiscent. He seems somehow vaguely to recall 
another long-passed period in our national life; 
the period when Jefferson rode to his inaugura- 
tion astride a white horse; when Lincoln ran the 
White House as the unconventional headquarters 
of a real democracy; when it was quite the thing 
to have a moving faith in representative govern- 
ment; and when we were accustomed to say in 
public speeches that America had been chosen by 
Almighty God for a special mission in the world 
demanding a more than ordinary degree of devo- 
tion and self-sacrifice. The day when Govern- 
ment governed, and the individual still had the 
habit of looking to himself for his success and 
economic salvation, not to Congress or the Presi- 
dent. 

Coolidge is a Yankee; he has spent his whole 
life amid the traditions of the forefathers, and is 
himself a kind of an embodiment of those tradi- 
tions, a kind of contemporary forefather. 

There are three places where one may go to find 
out about Calvin Coolidge. To Plymouth, Ver- 
mont, twelve miles from a railroad, where he was 
born and brought up; to Northampton, Massa- 
chusetts, where he held about every office that his 



neighbors could elect him to — and where Mrs. 
Coolidge and the two boys still live in half of a 
little frame house not nearly as pretentious as 
the house Lincoln occupied when he was earning 
three thousand dollars a year by the practice of 
law in Springfield — and to Boston, where he 
camps in two rooms in the Adams House, and 
walks to and from his job morning and night like 
any other workingman. 

There is a popular misconception about his 
ancestry. It is asumed that he is connected with 
a family of the same name which occupies a posi- 
tion of considerable wealth and social influence 
in Boston. I had that notion in the beginning. 
Later I learned that his grandfather was a farmer 
in Vermont, his father, John Calvin Coolidge, a 
farmer and country merchant who enjoys the title 
of colonel by reason of service on the staff of a 
governor of Vermont, while Calvin himself 
reached Massachusetts by way of Amherst Col- 
lege and the class of 1895. 

He was a raw country boy, his pants tucked into 
his boot tops, and the marks of rural Vermont 
plain upon hjm. To the majority of the college 
he remained unknown throughout the four years; 
and with the exception of certain scholastic 
honors attained no prominence. Only a very few 
of the more thoughtful men saw in him anything 
unusual. 

To those few there was the same peculiar fasci- 
nation that has both lured and baffled men in his 
later career. He made no effort whatever to be 
popular; often hardly a word would pass his lips 
for days at a time, except such as were absolutely 
necessary to keep him supplied with food and to 
report his presence in the classroom. So much 
silence, such concentrated silence, might well 
savor of a pose; but Coolidge comes by it natur- 
ally enough. His grandfather was a notorious 
hoarder of words, and his father, whose common 
sense and straight thinking have made his neigh- 



bors turn to him as a sort of unofficial magistrate 
in matters of neighborhood policy or dispute, 
manages life with a mere fraction of the ordinary 
allotment of conversation. If silence were really 
golden, the income tax of the Coolidge family 
would be something immense.- 

After graduation Calvin Coolidge moved across 
the river and settled four miles from Amherst, in 
Northampton. "Never could see much advan- 
tage in roaming around," he explained. There for 
two years he studied law in the office of Ham- 
mond and Field. After he. had been in the office 
about three months Mr. Field noticed an item in 
the Springfield "Republican" to this effect: 

"John Calvin Coolidge, a student at law in the 
office of Hammond and Field, Northampton, has 
been awarded the hundred-and-fifty-dollar gold 
medal offered to the member of the Senior Class 
of any American college for the best essay on a 
historical subject. 

Mr. Field showed the item to Coolidge and 
asked him if he had received the medal. He said 
he had. Mr. Field asked him where it was, and 
he produced it from his desk. 

"How long have you had it?" Field demanded. 

"About six weeks." 

"Why didn't you tell us you had received it." 

"I don't know." 

"Have you told your father?" 

"No," said Coolidge. "Would you?" 

He passed the medal over to Field, asking that 
it be kept in the safe, and for a good many years 
he never showed it to anybody. In the same 
noiseless fashion he conducted his domestic and 
professional affairs in Northampton, establishing 
a modest home, and living always very quietly, 
but with an unusual degree of serious attention 
to his job. Presently his fellow townsmen elected 
him to the city council; then city solicitor; then 
mayor; then senator. So in time he became presi- 



dent cf the Senate; lieutenant governor, and 
finally governor. 

Thus his whole active life has been spent in 
public service; and few men can bring to high 
position a more consistent or varied experience in 
administrative affairs. Viewed as a whole, his 
career seems a perfectly logical development, one 
election following naturally and almost inevitably 
upon the preceding one. Yet each fresh honor 
has been a kind of mystery to the political wise- 
acres of the State, and — one is tempted to think — 
even to himself. He had no intention of remain- 
ing in public life, and he has consistently neglect- 
ed all of the little precautions which are consid- 
ered elementary by professionals in the game. 

For example, he has never joined any lodge. It 
is an axiom of politics that the public man should 
be a "joiner." The opportunities for acquaintance 
and support which the lodges provide are too ob- 
vious to be disregarded, and nearly every public 
man will be found on the membership rolls of a 
number of them. Coolidge is not even a member 
of the Grange. He respects the lodge, and un- 
derstands fully its service and appeal, but he is 
not naturally gregarious; he has been busy at the 
job all his life, and he has too much downright 
sincerity to seek membership merely for what it 
might mean to him in the way of support. 

Similarly, he has apparently made no effort to 
cultivate friendships, even when they were certain 
to prove influential. The man who has been his 
chief supporter in Massachusetts was deeply 
offended by him in their first encounter. That 
man, a prominent merchant in Boston, was a 
member of the Board of Trustees of Amherst 
College, The trustees desired the legislature to 
pass a law allowing the college to connect its 
sewer system, with the sewer system of the town, 
and he, with his attorney, went to talk with 
Coolidge about it. 

They laid the matter before him, and when they 



had finished Coolidge said nothing. He made 
neither promise nor suggestion. He was himself 
an Amherst man; he was the senator from the 
Amherst district, charged with responsibiHty in 
such matters; yet they left his office utterly at sea 
as to his attitude toward their appeal. Later, it 
appeared that the session of the legislature was so 
far along that nothing could be done then. 
Coolidge understood this, and probably assumed 
that they understood it, too. At the next session 
he attended to the matter promptly. But the 
chance to put those two men under obligation to 
him, to impress them with his efficiency and good 
will, to line them up as possible supporters for the 
future — all this he totally disregarded. They left 
his office feeling as though they had been re- 
buffed — because they did not understand the man. 

There are dozens of anecdotes to the same 
effect. One cannot hear them without marveling. 
It takes an immense amount of faith in the trust- 
worthiness of the voters, in their ability to recog- 
nize faithful work and reward it, for any public 
official to conduct his career as Coolidge has done. 
He has stuck to his various jobs, doing them 
without self-advertisement, with an old-fashioned 
thoroughness dictated by an old-fashioned con- 
science, willing to let the record speak for itself, 
and equally willing, apparently, to step down at 
any time when the voters should find the record 
insufficient. 

That sort of quiet, undeviating work and study 
develop a self-reliance and a degree of solid 
knowledge of the job that are bound sooner or 
later to make themselves felt. Coolidge's oppor- 
tunity to show what the years had given him 
came, of course, with the police strike in Boston. 
His whole action there was characteristic. He 
showed no nervous eagerness to leap into the 
limelight. It was the duty of the mayor of 
Boston, under the law, to handle the situation 
so long as the forces at his command were 

8 



adequate. Only when the thing was distinctly up 
to him did Coolidge act, and there was no hesi- 
tation then. 

The attorney general of the State and one of 
the leading constitutional lawyers had been work- 
ing together for a day or more to examine the 
law and determine exactly what the governor 
might and ought to do. They met with him at 
luncheon to present the results of their research, 
but before they could lay their plan before him, 
he startled them with a question: 

"Would it not be possible for me, under such 
and such statutes, and such and such decisions, 
to take this course of action?" he asked. And 
thereupon outlined to them exactly the plan 
which they had devised, quoting the very authori- 
ties they had gathered. In his own quiet way he 
had made sure of the law, and was ready for the 
emergency. 

What happened in Boston during the strike, 
and thereafter, everyone knows. The voters of 
Massachusetts registered their verdict upon the 
incident by giving him a majority of over one 
hundred and twenty-five thousand votes in the 
elections following — a greater majority than had 
been rolled up by any governor of Massachusetts 
for many years. 

I said at the beginning of this article that there 
are certain old-fashioned characteristics of 
Coolidge that are exceedingly refreshing in these 
ultra-modern days. Most obvious among them 
is the simplicity of his living. He has managed 
to stay in public Hfe for twenty years only by 
living a 1920 life on the basis of 1820's expendi- 
tures. His house in Northampton is unpreten- 
tious. He has always been well dressed, and so 
are his two boys, John and Calvin. But beyond 
this his living is conducted on the plane of the 
most ordinary private citizen. 

As lieutenant governor he lived in a room at 
the Adams House in Boston that cost him one 



dollar a day. After his election as governor his 
friends waited upon him with a suggestion. 

"You ought to take a furnished house on 
Beacon Hill," they said, "where you can enter- 
tain influential men, and live like a governor." 

He listened without comment, but the only 
change he has made in his mode of living is to 
take one more room at the Adams House. He 
now has two instead of one; and his ten-thousand- 
dollar salary is doubtless enough to keep him and 
his family and leave a margin over. 

In all his previous offices he had time to carry 
on some private practice, but it never amounted 
to more than a very few thousand dollars a year. 

There are two ways to be independent in life: 
One is to make money enough to cover all your 
wants; the other is to limit your wants so strictly 
that you don't need much money to cover them. 
Coolidge has adopted the second expedient. 
Money, apparently, is no larger factor in his 
thoughts than it was in Lincoln's. But, unlike 
Lincoln — who never could understand figures and 
took no interest in the financial department of the 
Government — Coolidge has a keen Yankee appre- 
ciation of finance. He is never worried about 
money, as Lincoln was for so many years. He 
is solvent always; he pays his bills punctually on 
the first of the month, buys himself a couple of 
boxes of stogies, and is relieved of all money 
cares for another thirty days. No day laborer in 
the commonwealth works longer hours, or with 
more consistent application to the job than he. 
And few are so poor that they do not live fully 
as lavishly as their governor. 

The second thing that heartens one in these 
days of social panaceas is his whole-hearted recog- 
nition of economic fundamentals. It has for 
years been the fashion of politicians to ride into 
office by abusing wealth and promising a millen- 
nium of comfort to labor through legislation. 

10 



Against that sort of demogogy Coolidge has stood 
like a rock, 

"The people cannot look to legislation gener- 
ally for success," he said in his speech on assum- 
ing the presidency of the Senate. "Industry, 
thrift, character, are not conferred by act or 
resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. 
It can provide no substitute for the rewards of 
service. It can, of course, care for the defective, 
and recognize distinguished merit. The normal 
must take care for themselves. Self-government 
means self-support. 

"Man is born into the universe with a person- 
ality that is his own. He has a right that is 
founded upon the constitution of the universe, to 
have property that is his own. Ultimately, prop- 
erty rights and personal rights are the same thing. 
The one cannot be preserved if the other be 
violated. Each man is entitled to his rights and 
the rewards of his service, be they never so large 
or never so small." 

And again, in his speech to the Amherst alumni: 

"As a result of criticizing these conditions (the 
distribution of wealth) there has grown up a too- 
well-developed public opinion along two lines; 
one, that the men engaged in great affairs are 
selfish and greedy and not to be trusted, that busi- 
ness activity is not moral and the whole system 
is to be condemned, and the other, that work is 
a curse to man, and that working hours ought to 
be as short as possible, or in some way abol- 
ished. * * * 

"I agree that the measure of success is not 
merchandise, but character. But I do criticize 
those sentiments, held in all too respectable 
quarters, that our economic system is fundamen- 
tally wrong, that commerce is only selfishness, 
and that our citizens, holding the hope of all that 
America means, are living in industrial slavery. 

* * * The man who builds a factory builds 
a temple; the man who works there worships 



there, and to each is due, not scorn and blame, 
but reverence and praise." 

If anyone has uttered sounder doctrine for these 
troubled days, in more effective language than 
that, I have not seen the utterance. 

The clarity of his thought and the beauty of 
the expression is another element of attraction in 
Coolidge. There are passages in his speeches 
that rise to the best heights of American elo- 
quence, and few men have the power of con- 
densing a big thought into more trenchant lan- 
guage. Take these bits as typical: 

"Do the day's work," he said to the Senate. 
"If it be to protect the rights of the weak, who- 
ever objects, do it. If it be to help a powerful 
corporation better to serve the people, whatever 
the opposition, do that. Expect to be called a 
standpatter, but don't be a standpatter. Expect 
to be called a demagogue, but don't be a dema- 
gogue. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as 
science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as 
the multiplication table." 

Or again: 

"When you substitute patronage for patriotism, 
administration breaks down. We need more of 
the Office Desk and less of the Show Window 
in politics. Let men in office substitute the mid- 
night oil for the limelight." 

Or this, at the time of the police strike: 

"There is no right to strike against the public 
safety by anybody, anywhere, any time." 

In days like these, when it seems as if so many 
public men were reading nothing beyond the 
newspapers, when every problem seems to come 
to them wholly new, as though nothing of the 
sort had ever occurred in human history before, 
it is heartening indeed to find a man who has 
read much of history, who brings some mental 
background to the discussion of the day's work, 
and who can carry on that discussion in lan- 

12 



guage that lifts rather than lowers the average of 
the day's news. 

Finally, one cannot fail to be impressed with 
Coolidge's steadfast faith in the soundness of our 
institutions. And by an even larger faith, also — 
a vision of the spiritual foundations that underlie 
all political and economic problems. It is their 
failure to discover any spiritual element in our 
economic life that is so disappointing in most 
of the utterances of capitalists and labor leaders 
alike. Too many labor leaders talk as if, by add- 
ing another dollar to the day's wage and cutting 
another hour off the day's work, we might 
straightaway bring in the millennium. Those of 
us who have seen that process carried to its final 
fruitage in the lives of the idle rich know that 
there is no one more miserable than the man who 
has had many dollars added to his day's income 
and all the hour^ of work abolished. 

Man does not live by bread alone. He is a 
spirit, not a physical machine. And no man is 
fit for large leadership in America who fails to 
recognize that great truth. 

"Statutes must appeal to more than material 
welfare," Coolidge has said. "Wages won't 
satisfy, be they never so large. Nor houses; nor 
lands; nor coupons, though they fall thick as the 
leaves of autumn. Man has a spiritual nature. 
Touch it, and it must respond as the magnet 
responds to the pole. To that, not to selfishness, 
le the laws of the Commonwealth appeal. Recog- 
nize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let 
the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her hum- 
blest citizen, performing the most menial task, 
the recognition of his manhood, the recognition 
that all men are peers, the humblest with the most 
exalted, the recognition thai all work is glorified. 
Such is the path of equality before the law. Such 
is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such 
is the sublime revelation of man's relation to man 
— Democracy." 

13 



The greatest leaders we have had have been 
spiritual leaders. In Washington, in Lincoln and 
Roosevelt, in every man who has stirred America, 
there has been always an appeal that reached 
down beneath the material to something large, 
and unselfish, and eternal in men. And Calvin 
Coolidge, also, is a leader of that sort. 



14 



